On Tuesday, right before a court hearing in the lawsuit filed by Washington State and the National Alliance to End Homelessness, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development announced that it’s pulling the Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) for homeless investments—the subject of the lawsuit.
HUD filed a “notice of withdrawal” in the Rhode Island federal district court where the case is being heard, and claimed in their filing that the issues the state and NAEH raise in the lawsuit are now “moot.” The judge in the case, District Judge Mary McElroy, said the federal government’s last-minute withdrawal “feels like intentional chaos” during a hearing on Monday.
Local agency and elected leaders and a spokesperson for the King County Regional Homelessness Authority told PubliCola they’re still trying to figure out what the decision means for local agencies that rely on federal funds. HUD’s one-paragraph announcement shed little light on the timeline or potential changes, saying only that “the withdrawal will allow the Department to make appropriate revisions to the NOFO, and the Department intends to do so.”
The NOFO—there’s simply no way of getting around the acronym— is an annual funding process for homelessness programs, administered in the Seattle region by the KCRHA, acting as the region’s Continuum of Care. A mandatory committee, the Continuum of Care Board, considers a consolidated regional application for funds each year and approves it for transmission to HUD.
As we reported last month, HUD’s latest NOFO includes many provisions that could exclude KCRHA and other CoCs in blue states and cities from receiving funds, including provisions that prohibit funding for programs that acknowledge and accommodate trans and nonbinary people, those that help specific racial minorities, and those that allow—or have ever allowed—drug use on site.
Beyond those restrictions, the new NOFO also strictly limits funding for permanent housing of all types, from rapid rehousing vouchers to service-rich permanent supportive housing, to 30 percent of total NOFO funding. In Seattle, where more than 90 percent of HUD funding pays for permanent housing, this new restriction alone could put thousands of housed people back onto streets or into the overtaxed shelter system.
KCRHA spokeswoman Lisa Edge said the agency has been planning since last month for the impacts of the delayed NOFO, which was supposed to come out last summer. The November announcement left housing and service providers with just two months to submit new applications under completely different rules by January, with decisions from HUD coming down in May; now, it’s unclear when HUD will release a new version of the NOFO and what kind of restrictions on funding it will include.
According to Edge, some current homeless service contracts were scheduled for renewal in February, March, and April; if the NOFO gets delayed further, pushing back the January deadline for applications, even more contracts may expire without new funding, depriving these housing programs of federal funds.
Slide from KCRHA Continuum of Care board presentation illustrating the “hungry hungry hippo” nature of the competition for federal funding
One step KCRHA is taking to improve its competitiveness for federal funding is a new recruitment push that’s partly aimed at getting elected officials and at least one representative from law enforcement to join its Continuum of Care board. NOFO applications are judged on points; under the NOFO that HUD just pulled, the federal agency planned to allocate extra points for CoCs that have at least three elected officials, and at least one law enforcement official, on the board.
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Under its original 2020 charter, the CoC board was composed largely of members of the Lived Experience Coalition, an advocacy group, and is still made up largely of people with direct, sometimes current, experience with homelessness. The board has had its share of controversy over the years, including a meeting that devolved into a shouting match over the nomination of a man who’d been convicted of multiple sexual offenses involving minors as young as 13.
Since that controversy, the agency has tried to add more homeless service providers to the board and bring more conventional professionalism to its work. CoC meetings are generally less structured than typical government meetings, and often spin out into conversations about topics that are tangential to the official agenda; last week, for instance, a CoC meeting about the new NOFO included a digressive debate about whether a “dog catcher,” which is not an elected position, would have particular insights about homelessness that would make them a valuable elected addition to the board.
Later in that meeting, multiple board members appeared to be learning about the changes to federal funding requirements for the first time, asking a staffer questions about how the overall NOFO process works and what the potential impact of the changes will be.
1. The King County Regional Homelessness Authority has signed a contract with Barb Oliver, the head of tiny house builder Sound Foundations, to serve as a chief policy advisor to agency CEO Kelly Kinnison. Oliver is a longtime advocate for sheltering people in tiny houses—if you’ve ever read a Danny Westneat column about how there are tons of little freestanding shelters “just sitting around in a warehouse,” waiting to shelter people, you’ve read quotes from her. (The underlying problem isn’t really that there aren’t enough structures for people to live in, but that it’s often incredibly hard to site tiny house villages because of NIMBY objections).
According to Oliver, her title will be Senior Advisor for Special Projects. PubliCola has requested additional information about the contract, including the dollar amount, from KCRHA. Late last month, the agency eliminated 28 positions, including high-level roles like finance director and general counsel, to save money; shortly afterward, Kinnison hired five new people, including one man whose proposed hiring earlier this year led to several internal complaints by people who all ended up losing their jobs in the layoffs.
2. Earlier this month, Kinnison took a trip to Baltimore, MD with The More We Love director Kristine Moreland and Compass Housing Alliance preseident Christopher Ross to learn about a Christian recovery program operated by the Helping Up Mission in that city.
Helping Up, like Union Gospel Mission and other religious missions across the country, is an explicitly Christian organizations that requires recovery program participants to participate in religious services, a controversial practice even among some faith-based homeless service providers. Helping Up’s Spiritual Recovery Program teaches participants “Spiritual 101 through Bible studies, chapel, and discipleship,” according to the mission’s website.
The program also includes mandatory “work therapy.” According to a profile in Baltimore magazine, program participants do 80 percent of the work of running the program.
KCRHA spokeswoman Lisa Edge described Kinnison’s trip to Baltimore as “an opportunity to learn from [Helping Up Mission’s] successes,” and said the group “partners with Johns Hopkins University, are well respected at the federal level, and provide critical resources to people experiencing homelessness.”
Asked if KCRHA hopes to invest local funding in similar groups, Edge said KCRHA already contracts with many faith-based groups, like Catholic Community Services, The Salvation Army, and Muslim Housing Services. KCRHA’s budget indicates that funding for these groups is generally limited to shelter, not religious programs like Helping Up’s addiction program.
Edge did not respond to questions about whether KCRHA plans to contract with The More We Love. The group, which Moreland started as a for-profit company selling private encampment “sweeps” to landowners, has received contracts for encampment outreach in Burien and for its “high-accountability” shelter program in Renton, which provides temporary lodging to women seeking to leave the sex trade on Aurora Ave. N.
3. Although both Dan Strauss and Bob Kettle have been rumored to be the top contenders to replace outgoing City Councilmember Sara Nelson as council president, the consensus choice appears to be a different person entirely: District 3 Councilmember Joy Hollingsworth.
4. I was on the City Cast Seattle podcast this week, talking about the local impact of federal cuts to funding for permanent housing, the changes coming to city and county government as a new mayor and King County executive take over, and what “Seattle Nice” means to me, as one-third of the Seattle Nice podcast. What does it say about me that when they asked me what I’d do with an extra $51, my brain immediately went to complaining about Seattle’s overpriced, mostly mediocre food?
5. Mayor-elect Katie Wilson is planning to reorg the mayor’s office significantly from the way it’s been run under her last several. predecessors. The biggest change, according to an internal document provided by the transition team, is that Wilson will have just one deputy mayor (and two other direct reports, a chief of staff and a director of departments), as opposed to four deputy mayors under Harrell, a setup that has led to internal power struggles and factionalism in the mayor’s office.
Having a smaller, more “clearly-delieated” team of top staff will mean everyone has a clear role, and putting one person over all the executive departments will help Wilson’s administration empower department directors (another goal outlined in the internal memo), who have often had to accept top-down direction from the Harrell administration instead of collaborating on decisions as policy experts.
My favorite suggestion in the memo, though, is “No drama”—a constant feature of Harrell’s administration. There’s a whole section about how to achieve this, but the bottom line is this: “We don’t think you should hire jerks.” What a novelty!
DESC’s Hobson Place, a permanent supportive housing development that provides housing and health care for chronically homeless people. Image via Runberg Architects.
The city and county are working on plans to offset potential federal funding cuts under the Trump Administration.
By Erica C. Barnett
Major changes to the way the federal government funds programs that house people experiencing homelessness could put most of Seattle’s homelessness system at risk at risk, and thousands of people living in the Seattle area could become homeless as soon as next year as the Trump Administration shifts homelessness funding from permanent housing to short-term transitional housing with new strings attached.
“This is another cruel policy choice intentionally designed by the Trump Regime to harm our most vulnerable community members, and once again local governments are being asked to step up to meet the moment,” Seattle City Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck said last week.
The potential cuts come from changes to an annual funding process known as a Notice of Funding Opportunity, or NOFO, which is administered in Seattle by the King County Regional Homelessness Authority, acting as the Continuum of Care (CoC) for the Seattle region. (A spokesperson for the KCRHA did not respond to multiple requests for an interview, including phone calls and text messages, last week).
Currently, housing and rental assistance programs in Seattle and King County receive around $67 million of federal funding through this process, almost all of which—around $60 million—goes toward permanent housing. Of that amount, around $36 million, or 60 percent, pays for permanent supportive housing for people with disabling behavioral health conditions, such as severe addiction or mental illness, who need intensive case management and other services in order to stay stably housed.
Under the new rules, just 30 percent of federal funding can pay for permanent housing of any kind, including rental assistance; the rest must go toward short-term approaches like temporary housing. Assuming current funding levels, the new rules would provide less than $20 million for permanent housing, potentially putting thousands of people who are currently housed back on the street, including 4,500 in the Seattle area alone.
“This crisis should horrify and unite us,” said Alison Eisinger, director of the Seattle-King County Coalition on Homelessness. “[T]he ideologues are firmly embedded and the attempts to defund housing are even worse than feared.
In addition to reducing funding for housing in general, the new regulations stipulate that permanent supportive housing—a kind of service-rich long-term housing designed specifically for people whose disabling behavioral health conditions have made it impossible for them to retain housing on their own—should only be for people with physical disabilities and those who are elderly.
Downtown Emergency Service Center director Daniel Malone said says this change represents a complete misunderstanding of why permanent supportive housing exists, not to mention the needs of people with physical disabilities. DESC, which receives about $20 million a year in federal funding for its permanent supportive housing and rental assistance programs, stands to lose a quarter of its supportive housing budget because of the federal changes.
“The vast majority of people with physical disabilities don’t need what you would call ‘support’—they need physical accommodations,” like wheelchair ramps and grab bars, Malone said. Permanent supportive housing provides similar accommodations for behavioral health conditions. On-site behavioral health services “are what allows someone to be successful in retaining their housing, and this administration is turning that on its head,” Malone said.
At a webinar on the changes last week, two HUD representatives, both previously affiliated with Seattle’s right-wing Discovery Institute, reportedly alarmed participants with their ignorance about the purpose of permanent housing. One, Robert Marbut, is the head of the Interagehcy Council on Homelessness. During the first Trump administration, he advocated for forcibly moving homeless people to “campuses” on the outskirts of cities on the threat of arrest. The other, Caitlyn McKenney, worked briefly as a research fellow at the Discovery Institute after graduating college in 2022; she’s now a HUD policy advisor on homelessness.
During the webinar, Marbut and McKenney told reportedly housing and service providers from around the country that they could easily follow the new rules by simply converting their permanent housing units into short-term transitional housing with mandatory treatment that would quickly cure whatever behavioral health problems people have, such as lifelong addiction or schizophrenia.
“Instead of understanding that mental illness and substance use disorder are often lifelong disease processes, HUD is instructing communities to move stably housed people by the tens of thousands into transitional housing (with a two year maximum stay) and require them to work and accept treatment, despite much evidence that this is a failed approach,” Eisinger said.
Imposing treatment and work requirements on people with long-term disabilities is also impractical, since most housing projects receive funding from many sources (such as state Low-Income Housing Tax Credits) that are earmarked for permanent housing.
On top of all that, the Trump administration has repeatedly delayed the release of the NOFO, which was supposed to come out last summer. The delay leaves housing and service providers with just two months to meet an end-of-year deadline to submit new applications under completely different rules; it also means that money for both new and existing programs won’t start flowing until later in the year, after funding for existing programs runs out.
“Homelessness is a current, large problem across the country, and they’re effectively doing something that will put federal homelessness dollars more or less on hold because they waited so long to come out with this,” Malone said.
Malone says HUD could fix the problem for this year by simply extending the existing contracts and letting providers spend the next six months coming up with new proposals before releasing another NOFO in the summer of 2026—something even Republican lawmakers, whose own districts stand to lose millions in federal funding under he new rules, have requested.
Local Solutions
It’s far from certain that the Seattle area will get the same amount of federal funding it has in the past, because the new rules penalize progressive policies adopted by most blue cities. Programs that operate on harm reduction principles, like those that allow people to use drugs on site, are no longer eligible for federal funding; those that include any kind of racial preference or explicitly acknowledge the existence of transgender people are also out. Organizations that check people’s immigration status get preferential treatment under the new rules.
Even if HUD agrees to delay its funding process until next year—a big “if,” given the Trump administration’s wrecking-ball approach to governance—the city, county, and state will need to come up with creative ways to address and offset the likely cuts. Last week, state and local leaders met to discuss options to fill the gap.
One (complex, but likely) option is to swap out funding for programs that currently rely on federal dollars, like permanent supportive housing, for programs that come closest to meeting the new criteria. The city, for example, might decide to pay for direct rental subsidies with local funds that previously paid for abstinence-based treatment, applying for federal dollars for the treatment program.
Lisa Daugaard, co-director of the nonprofit Purpose Dignity Action, whose CoLEAD program moved people living in state-owned rights-of-way into housing before the state defunded it earlier this year, said, “With care and a strategic approach, it’s likely that we can put together a strong application for comparable funding to what we currently receive, but it’s also clear that much of what we propose should be different from our region’s traditional Continuum of Care package.”
This option, which would have to take place on a tight timeline, would require nonprofits that have never applied for federal funding to get up to speed on the application process and apply for funds, knowing that if they don’t get picked, their current funders (the city, county, or both) might not be able to backfill the losses. For nonprofits, that scenario creates considerable risk, and it’s still unclear what incentives the city and county might offer to make it worth their while.
Since swapping is unlikely to close a potential gap on its own, the city and county are also working to create reserves, or contingency funds, in their 2026 budgets that could help keep programs going.
This week, King County Councilmember Teresa Mosqueda is introducing a budget amendment that asks incoming County Executive Girmay Zahilay to propose a supplemental budget by March that establishes a reserve to address any federal funding shortage. Although the amendment doesn’t require a specific dollar amount, it does note that the total gap is at least $36 million, and calls out three types of funding—new revenues, existing county budget reserves, and any funds left unspent at the end of 2025—as sources for the reserve.
“The Continuum of Care funding is the fabric of our safety net,” Mosqueda said. “It helps people not only stay housed, but get access to the critical services they need to stabilize people. If there are going to be impossible contingencies tied to federal dollars that make it hard to not only house people but meet their health needs, we need to step up to make sure that the Continuum of Care is truly a continuum.”
County Councilmember Jorge Barón, who is supporting Mosqueda’s amendment, said the county “should be advocating and doing whatever we can to have federal support in this area—we should not give up and assume all is lost—but at the same time, we need to be cognizant of the fact that there’s risks in this area and we should prepare to have contingency funds available if the worst outcomes do turn out to be true.”
Given limited funds, Barón said, the county opted not to add a lot of new spending in this year’s budget, and to use most of the proceeds from its new public safety sales tax, about $175 million, to address its own budget deficit and preserve funding for programs that would otherwise be cut—like the Salvation Army homeless shelter in SoDo, which started during COVID and relied on federal emergency funds.
That’s a sharp contrast to the city of Seattle, where, in an election-year swan song, Mayor Bruce Harrell piled tens of millions of dollars in new spending onto an already unsustainable budget that the council is currently in the process of padding further.
In addition to Harrell priorities like graffiti removal and police surveillance, the proposed budget included $8 million in one-time funds for new shelter, plus $4 million for a new Pioneer Square encampment resolution program that would be run jointly by the Downtown Seattle Association and Purpose Dignity Action.
“The Pioneer Square effort, which could later move to other neighborhoods if continued, would bring back the same model used in the Right of Way encampment resolution program, and JustCARE before that,” in advance of the FIFA World Cup games next year, Daugaard said.
But many advocates, including Eisinger and Rinck, argue that now is not the time to invest in new homelessness programs. “We should not be spending public dollars do something new before we have secured the housing that exists,” Eisinger said. “This is a crisis. In a crisis, you have to make hard decisions. I do not in any way, shape, or form believe that we should be putting money into a whole slew of new things during an authoritarian takeover.”
Last week, Rinck passed a budget amendment that prohibits the city from spending $11.1 million of the $11.8 million allocated to the new shelter beds and the Pioneer Square encampment resolution program until at least next year, when HUD releases the details of its 2026 grants. An amendment from Councilmember Bob Kettle removed $700,000 of the total to fund a quarter of the proposed encampment pilot, for which the PDA has already master-leased an apartment building. Combined with the $9 million Harrell’s budget set aside to address federal funding cuts, the money will bring the city’s total contingency fund to $20.4 million.
Arguing for her proposal on Friday, Rinck said it was important to “pause on expansions for the next couple of months until we resolve and understand the outcome” of the changes to federal funding requirements.
Council members who support sweeps, surveillance, and graffiti vigilance expressed outrage about federal funding cuts—Maritza Rivera, referring to Trump, said, “I just can’t understand why anyone would not want to house people, feed people, care for children, care for families”—but couldn’t seem to find a spare dime in other parts of the budget to help offset those federal cuts.
In fact, the council took proactive steps to prohibit the incoming Katie Wilson administration from using city funds to pay for needs like shelter and housing in the future. Rob Saka, who delivered his own high-volume diatribe against the Trump Administration, proposed an amendment prohibiting the new administration from repurposing funds dedicated to Harrell’s newly expanded encampment sweeps team on any other purpose. After several councilmembers delivered paeans to the team and its longtime advocate, outgoing deputy mayor Tiffany Washington, they passed Saka’s spending restriction on a 6-2 vote, with Rinck voting no and Dan Strauss abstaining.
1. After laying off 13 people and holding 15 vacant positions open as part of a cost-cutting effort last month, King County Regional Homelessness Authority director Kelly Kinnison added five new positions, including three new executives— erasing some of the savings the KCRHA achieved by axing its deputy director, chief financial officer, associate strategy director, general counsel, and research and data director, among others.
As PubliCola reported last month, the layoffs included every person who filed complaints against Kinnison earlier this year, claiming she displayed racial bias after she attempted to create new positions for two white men, allegedly passing over potential Black internal candidates for those roles. At the time, Kinnison backed off on the hires while the authority conducted an investigation. The investigation ended when the KCRHA board voted to place “a letter reminding [Kinnison] of the organization’s policy on retaliation” in her file and hire an executive coach, who ended up advising Kinnison on which jobs to cut.
This week, Kinnison hired one of the men whose proposed employment by KCRHA led to the investigation in the first place. William Towey, the director of Lake City Partners, will start next week as associate director of strategy—the same title Xochitl Maykovich, one of the staffers who complained about Kinnison, held before she quit in August. Lake City Partners provides shelter and services in North Seattle.
We’ve reached out to KCRHA about Towey’s new role at the agency, as well as whether Kinnison plans to hire the other man she considered earlier this year, who currently runs a nonprofit focused on youth and young adult homelessness.
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2. Abdul Yusuf, the founder of the Eastside for Hire taxi company and an ardent supporter of Mayor Bruce Harrell, didn’t respond when we reached out to ask him what kind of “outreach and engagement” he did for the campaign, which paid him $5,000 a week for undefined services (for comparison, that’s what Harrell’s chief consultant, Christian Sinderman, made from the campaign every month).
Yusuf has been downright voluble on Facebook, however, posting after the election that he, along with Seattle Office of Refugee Affairs director Hamdi Mohamed and Breakfast Group founder Nate Miles, had been able “to organize nearly 500 volunteers in support of Mayor Bruce Harrell’s campaign,” including “over 280 taxi drivers, more than 100 African daycare owners, 28 gas station owners, and many other small-business and community leaders.”
Seattle’s East African community, like most, was divided over the mayor’s race and some who supported Wilson over Harrell reported feeling pressure to support Harrell or refrain from supporting Wilson publicly. In his post, Yusuf accuses “some ome within our broader community” of trying “to play both sides — showing public support while quietly working for the opposition. That kind of double-dealing hurts more than open disagreement, but it also teaches us that true partnership is proven by consistency, not convenience.
In addition to her job at the city, Mohamed is a Seattle Port Commissioner. Miles’ organization, the Breakfast Group, is a mentorship program for young Black men; he jumped up during the We Heart Seattle/Discovery Institute-sponsored “Great Debate” earlier this year to deliver an impromptu pro-Harrell speech while Harrell answered friendly questions from the moderator, who was also a supporter.
Editor’s note: This post has been updated to reflect the fact KCRHA is hiring for five newly created positions.
The King County Regional Homelessness Authority made good on its promise to cut dozens of jobs if its funders, primarily the city of Seattle, didn’t provide more funding for staff, laying off 13 people, including Deputy CEO Simon Foster, and leaving 15 positions vacant. In addition to Foster, the cuts include the agency’s general counsel, chief financial officer, and director of data and research.
In an internal email sent to staff on Wednesday, KCRHA director Kelly Kinnison told staff that “Due to our budget shortfall and after careful consideration, the four executives “have been included in the workforce reductions.”
A few lines later, however, Kinnison wrote that the KCRHA will actually be hiring five new people, including at least three executive-level positions —a budget and administration coordinator, associate director of strategy, director of special projects, director of program policy, and an IT coordinator. Currently, only the associate director of strategy position is listed on the KCRHA’s website, at a salary ranging from $181,300 to $227,920.
“I understand that transitions like this can bring about a sense of uncertainty and apprehension. However, I am incredibly confident in the expertise and resilience of this remarkable team,” Kinnison wrote. “By fostering collaboration and embracing innovative approaches, we are driving meaningful change and uplifting our entire community.”
Earlier this year, the KCRHA painted a dire picture of what would happen if the city didn’t help it fill a $4.7 million budget shortfall. At the time, Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell’s deputy mayor in charge of homelessness, Tiffany Washington, said Harrell would not accept any cuts to services, so the only option, given that the city provides most of KCRHA’s funding, was to cut staff.
“The board, the public, other stakeholders that we’ve been working with have asked us to make cuts that will not affect services,” Kinnison said at a KCRHA governing board meeting earlier this week. “So at the direction of the board, I’ve partnered with HR Interrupted Consulting to get a sense of what someone from the outside who’s an organizational consultant would say about our org structure and how we should move forward with reducing our footprint.”
HR Interrupted is the company the board hired in September to provide “executive coaching” to Kinnison in response to at least four complaints from staff alleging the CEO was racially biased and had created a “toxic work environment” for staff. The staffers complained about Kinnison’s plan to create two new executive-level positions, each at a salary of $200,000 a year, and direct-hire two white men to fill them, bypassing the usual hiring process.
All four people who complained about Kinnison lost their jobs in the layoffs, as did Deputy CEO Foster, who had frequently clashed with Kinnison and strongly objected to her proposal to hire the two men. In addition to the racial equity concerns raised by other staffers, Foster argued that the new hires didn’t make financial sense and could make morale at the agency even worse than it already was.
At the board meeting this week, Kinnison said the layoffs would get rid of an excessively “top-heavy” structure at KCRHA and eliminate non-essential staff who were hired during a more optimistic time last year. Many of these recently hired staff were in “administrative positions that were sort of newer, when we thought, this time last year, we were going to have more funds and different things that we were going to need to take on with potentially a different federal administration,” Kinnison said.
In addition to Deputy CEO Foster, the 11 people being laid off include the KCRHA’s general counsel, chief financial officer, chief of research and data, emergency operations coordinator, data science director, Emergency Housing and Services division director, and human resources director. These individuals provide legal advice, provide reports on how many people are homeless in King County and who they are, coordinate shelter during weather emergencies, and oversee the KCRHA’s budget.
Kinnison intimated that some of these critical roles could be filled by “in-kind” support from Seattle and King County, but did not offer any details. A KCRHA spokesperson did not respond to multiple phone calls, emails, and texts about the layoffs.
In addition to the 11 outright layoffs, the KCRHA is eliminating 15 jobs that happen to be currently unfilled. HR will lose seven of its 10 employees, including an IT specialist and a payroll specialist, while the other vacant jobs include the agency’s chief program officer, three planners, two positions focused on youth and young adult homelessness, and a senior housing stability coordinator.
On Friday, the governing board of the King County Regional Homelessness Authority, made up mostly of elected officials from around the county, voted to resolve four workplace misconduct complaints against KCRHA CEO Kelly Kinnison with “a letter reminding her of the organization’s policy on retaliation,” King County Executive Shannon Braddock said during a special board meeting last Friday.
Kinnison will also have to participate in executive coaching through the end of the year. The coach, hired before KCRHA had completed its investigation, will cost KCRHA $67,500 and will also do an organizational assessment of the agency.
A four-member panel of KCRHA board members—Braddock, Seattle Deputy Mayor Tiffany Washington, Renton City Councilmember Ed Prince, and Auburn Human Services Director Kent Hay—came up with the disciplinary recommendation.
On Friday, Braddock noted that KCRHA had also retained three outside attorneys to work on the investigation. As we reported in August, Kinnison told the agency’s general counsel, Edmund Witter, that he could no longer work on HR issues shortly after he and other agency staff raised concerns about possible racial bias in Kinnison’s hiring decisions.
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PubliCola has filed records requests for the letter sent to Kinnison, which was not included in the public governing board agenda; the cost to hire three outside attorneys; and the final report on the investigation, also not included in the public agenda packet.
Staffers filed complaints against Kinnison after she proposed creating two new executive positions, with salaries of $200,000, and directly hiring two white men to fill them, including one who was reportedly allowed to write his own job description. Staff questioned whether these two new top-level positions were necessary at a time when the KCRHA could be facing significant cuts lower on the agency’s org chart. They also argued that if the new positions were truly necessary, there were qualified people of color already working at the agency who could take on those jobs.
Deputy KCRHA CEO Simon Foster raised similar concerns in an email to Kinnison, writing that “[b]ringing on additional high salaried executive roles during this time may compromise our fiscal credibility and sustainability.”
Additionally, Foster wrote, the hires could call into question KCRHA’s “commitment to equity, not just in outcomes, but in process and leadership composition.”
At least one of the four complainants—Xochitl Maykovich, who left the agency last month—accused Kinnison of retaliation, which was the subject of disciplinary letter Kinnison received.
Only King County Councilmember Jorge Barón voted against Kinnison’s slap-on-the-wrist discipline, saying, “I agree with the personnel committee’s assessment that disciplinary action is warranted. However, I believe further action is warranted and respectfully disagree with the recommended disciplinary action in this motion.” Barón later clarified to PubliCola that he did not mean that Kinnison should be fired, but that the discipline should have gone further than executive coaching and a sternly worded letter.
